The Sunday porch: Ellen Glasgow house, Richmond

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries.
— Ellen Glasgow

View from the back porch of the home of novelist Ellen Glasgow, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1930s, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (Click here for a larger view.)

Glasgow published 19 novels and an autobiography — The Woman Within — about life in Virginia. Their realism “helped direct Southern literature away from sentimentality and nostalgia.”

Her books were selling briskly in the 1930s, when these pictures were taken, and she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942.

Her home was built in 1841, and Glasgow lived there from the time her father bought it in 1887, when she was about 13, until her death in 1945.

It is now owned by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities but is not open to the public.

4 thoughts on “The Sunday porch: Ellen Glasgow house, Richmond”

Maximum pollinator habitat, hi-low density, something blooming all year, low maintenance, fragrant, fruit, unskilled labor can maintain. No, this is not a style of gardening wanted by today’s mow-blow-go-commidify-all-I-touch and let me put you on a contract lawn guy with a truck.